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xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

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Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#121

Post by theijcfj47744l »

linkage wrote: post #21
afavour wrote: post #6

Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?

No matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality. Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good…

This is mostly a HCI problem - Google's AI interface for eg. is horrible, but Perplexity is a joy to use.

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#122

Post by transcriptase »

retornam wrote: post #99

Telegram is a haven for scammers and malware authors, who frequently use it as a command and control channel. These scammers and malware authors can now seamlessly integrate Grok into their tools. Congrats everyone.

Wait until you find out about IRC!

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#123

Post by retornam »

northzen wrote: post #111
retornam wrote: post #99

Telegram is a haven for scammers and malware authors, who frequently use it as a command and control channel. These scammers and malware authors can now seamlessly integrate Grok into their tools. Congrats everyone.

Still better and more feature rich than WA.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly advantageous for scammers and malware authors.

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#125

Post by z3dd »

game_the0ry wrote: post #103

Call me stupid, but I fundamentally do not grasp why xAI would pay Telegram for access to its users. $300M seems like a crazy amount of money to put into a chat app. I am genuinely curious about the business strategy behind the move bc that would be a market worth exploring - having something that the AI industry would pay for bc they are willing to spend a lot right now.

oh, cause telegram is not a chat app, it's Facebook of eastern Europe

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#126

Post by sidcool »

afavour wrote: post #6

Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?

It's like Google paying Apple. Doesn't mean Google is bad, just means it needs the traffic and Apple has the reach.

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#127

Post by diggan »

abletonlive wrote: post #108
afavour wrote: post #6

Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?

Please tell us what you believe this is telling us. You’ve left it up to interpretation and this feels more like a Reddit quality comment than one that the hackernews community deserves. In my opinion, it’s telling us that competition in the LLM space is accelerating and it’s anybody’s game right now. It’s important enough of a space that companies are willing to pay for exposure and squeeze out the competition. I’ve…

> “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”,

I feel like for that to have been even possible to understand from that comment, then "not the other way around" couldn't have been there. If authors opinion was that LLMs has no value, why'd Telegram pay to use Grok?

Maybe I'm just used to reading between the lines, but I think parents comment strike a fine balance between saying too much, saying enough and saying too little. It's understandable what they mean, if you read the full comment. Not everything has to be explicitly spelled out for the lowest common denominator.

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#129

Post by rurp »

smeeth wrote: post #41
afavour wrote: post #6

Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?

I don't like Grok that much, but there's nothing particularly new or interesting about this deal. Telegram has a big international audience, it makes sense someone would pay to be the default for user adoption reasons. "Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Apple and not the other way around. If Google search was so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it to be the default search in Safari?"

The Google Search deal seems like a much more defensible business decision to me for a couple reasons. For starters Google gets revenue almost every single time that search integration is used so there is a direct return on the investment. What's the conversion rate for a paid Grok account? It might turn out to be terribly low and $300M is a substantial amount of money. I doubt a normal company without Elon's vast wealth network that needs to actually make money would gamble on a deal like this.

The other reason is that the Apple deal is a big part of maintaining Google's search monopoly. Owning a tech monopoly is vastly more valuable than competing in a crowded market so locking down market share to achieve that can be worth spending more per user than their median value. Grok isn't even in the ballpark of an LLM monopoly so those benefits don't apply in their case.

Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

#130

Post by retornam »

transcriptase wrote: post #122
retornam wrote: post #99

Telegram is a haven for scammers and malware authors, who frequently use it as a command and control channel. These scammers and malware authors can now seamlessly integrate Grok into their tools. Congrats everyone.

Wait until you find out about IRC!

When was the last time you ran into an IRC CnC server?
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